4 people, one of which is a board member of the Pirate Party, received prison sentence for running a pirate websites: all of them are in their 20s and were accused of running streaming portal Dreamfilm and other sites like Piratehub and Tankefetast. The men received between 6 and 10 months of jail time – approximately the same time as the operators of The Pirate Bay received in their landmark case a few years ago.

Swedish police targeted one of the country’s top streaming websites, Dreamfilm.se, more than 2 years ago. Along with defunct streaming portal Swefilmer, whose operators also went on trial recently, Dreamfilm accounted for up to a quarter of online viewing in the country. As a result, in early 2015, the site published a statement saying that it had been mutually agreed that the site would be shut down for good after its operator had been detained and interrogated.

However, the service later returned under a new name. Swedish police didn’t stop there and targeted several more sites, including the second largest torrent site in the country, Tankefetast, as well as torrent site PirateHub, and streaming portal Tankefetast Play (TFPlay). The investigation took many months, but recently the sites operators finally showed up in court – all of them admitted to being involved in Dreamfilm, but none accepted they had committed any crimes. The court didn’t agree and ruled that the men were sentenced to between 6 and 10 months in jail and ordered to pay damages of almost $150,000 to the movie industry.

The longest sentence was given to a man who founded Dreamfilm 5 years ago. A member of the Pirate Party, who was found to handle advertising and help administer the service, was sentenced to 8 months, while two other men were told to serve six months.